Tag: BitTorrent

Using the web seeding technology that I wrote about earlier, Burnbit is a new service that allows anyone to create a torrent of a file already hosted someplace on the internet, without first downloading the file to their computer. This can be done in two way: Either the user goes to their website and submit the file’s link or if the user has a website and needs to create torrents of certain files on the fly, Burnbit provides buttons, that can be enabled with a small javascript snippet.

So how can Burnbit be useful to the common folk? I can think of one case. Imaging there’s a huge file that you, and a bunch of your friends need to download off a website, let’s say a video game. But the download servers are really slow. So you take the game setup’s link, give that link to Burnbit and it creates a torrent out of it. Now you share that torrent with all your friends. Initially, everyone will be downloading from the server itself (using web seeding), but slowly, the client-server traffic will be converted to peer-to-peer traffic. All your friends will share the download burden and since data pieces will travel faster, everyone will get the file faster.

That was about the common user. A media producer on the other hand, can use Burnbit’s automatic button creation feature to instantly create torrents of their media, and thus create an addition download option for their users, which is much more stable than conventional http downloading, and will help decreases the load on the producer’s servers.

BitTorrent has been around for a while and like every other technology, it has evolved and become better. DHT, a form of decentralized distribution; Peer exchange, that allows a group of peers to share a file faster and so, several improvements have been made over the base protocol. One such feature called Web Seeding was implemented in 2006.

What are web seeds?

What seeds give the torrent client the ability to download torrent pieces/data from an http source in addition to the swarm. So if you have a file somewhere on the internet, you can simply add its link to your torrent. Now if the swarm is weak, the torrent client will fetch data from the http source. The advantage, of course, is that a publisher can create a torrent of a file which is already hosted on his server and not worry about seeding it full time, while the user can obtain the data directly from the http source or through the torrent. Either way, the user will get the data from the http source. However, if the torrent becomes popular and self-sustainable, the torrent client will fetch data from the swarm and only use the http seed for pieces which are not available or are deficient in the swarm.

This is a very good approach towards file distribution which can be used by artists, producers who distribute their content online. Using web seeds, they can keep their torrents alive for as long as their servers are up. A perfect balance between load-balancing and content availability.

How to use web seeds?

Adding a web seeds to a torrent is very easy. If you’re creating a torrent in uTorrent, just add the http (or https or ftp) link to the Web seeds box. Only http, https or ftp links will work. Also, do note that if the torrent has just one file, you can add its http link right away. However, if it’s a directory of files, you can add the http link of the directory in the Web Seeds box and the torrent client will automatically append the file names. If the torrent has just one file, the file names in the torrent and in the web seeds can be different. However, in the second case, where it’s a directory of files and only a http directory link has been given in as a web seed, make sure the file names in the torrent and in the http directory are same, because the torrent client will simply append file name and if they don’t match, the file won’t be web-seeded.

Pro tip: Want to share a file through bittorrent but can’t seed for a lot of time? Host the file on Dropbox and add its public link (or directory link) as a web seed. Your torrent will be alive as long as Dropbox is up (which is always)

Apple has a set of very stringent (and at times, nonsensical) guidelines for the App Store approval process. Many apps have, in the past, been rejected for ridiculous reasons. One category that Apple has always steered clear of approving for the App Store has been BitTorrent apps.

The BitTorrent protocol isn’t illegal, but it is the most common method to download pirated videos and music. There isn’t a single Torrent client on the App Store.

However, this week, the BitTorrent based app “IS Drive” was approved by Apple and added into the App Store. It is available for $4.99. It allows you to check and manage the downloads in your ImageShack Drive account. It also shows screenshots of completed video downloads.

The developer, Derek Kepner stated this in a interview with TorrentFreak: “I’m on dangerous ground here, and I know that. I’ll probably add a search feature where it’s up to the user to manually add the torrent site they want. The app will not be designed to easily break the law and I hope no one intends to do so. But if a user is determined to break the law, what business is that of mine or Apple’s? They could do the same in Safari anyway, right?”

“I always had the thought that if I didn’t call the app a torrent client, Apple would probably let it through the review process. After all, there is no real torrenting happening on the client side. It’s *not* a torrent client. It’s an ImageShack Drive client”

“Plus, I didn’t see any reason for the app to be rejected in Apple’s recently released guidelines. So, I was very careful with this release to not use the dirty word torrent’, and I’ll continue to carefully add new features, so stay tuned.”

Facebook uses BitTorent as an ideal solution for transferring huge amounts of files to a number of locations, in a short span of time. With that view, it uses BitTotrrent to upgrade files across its servers. This makes BitTorrent a prospective enterprise solution for file transfer and upgrades its image from being a simple file sharing utility.

Large websites have a huge number of servers to serve data locally, all of which synchronize centrally. We see this system prevalent in Google and Facebook. Facebook’s systems engineer Tom Cook talked at the Velocity Conference saying,

BitTorrent is fantastic for this, it’s really great. Its superduper’ fast and it allows us to alleviate a lot of scaling concerns we’ve had in the past, where it took forever to get code to the webservers before you could even boot it up and run it.

With this innovation, Facebook can send hundreds of MBs of updates to all its servers in a few minutes. Without BitTorrent, they say it would have taken hours for the process to complete.

Apparently, Facebook is not the only one using this tech. Twitter uses the same technology to roll out its updates. This endorsement has almost made BitTorrent an industry standard in transferring huge data reliably and quickly.

Facebook uses BitTorent as an ideal solution for transferring huge amounts of files to a number of locations, in a short span of time. With that view, it uses BitTotrrent to upgrade files across its servers. This makes BitTorrent a prospective enterprise solution for file transfer and upgrades its image from being a simple file sharing utility.

Large websites have a huge number of servers to serve data locally, all of which synchronize centrally. We see this system prevalent in Google and Facebook. Facebook’s systems engineer Tom Cook talked at the Velocity Conference saying,

BitTorrent is fantastic for this, it’s really great. Its superduper’ fast and it allows us to alleviate a lot of scaling concerns we’ve had in the past, where it took forever to get code to the webservers before you could even boot it up and run it.

With this innovation, Facebook can send hundreds of MBs of updates to all its servers in a few minutes. Without BitTorrent, they say it would have taken hours for the process to complete.

Apparently, Facebook is not the only one using this tech. Twitter uses the same technology to roll out its updates. This endorsement has almost made BitTorrent an industry standard in transferring huge data reliably and quickly.

Deluge, the popular Bit Torrent client has just released their version 1.2.0. Deluge is completely written in Python and uses GTK+ for the front-end. It is specially made for the XCFE and Gnome desktop environments. Deluge offers fast torrent downloads and has support for multiple trackers. The best thing about Deluge is that it is cross platform, free licensed under the GPL and has a smooth UI. Deluge also works equally good for many other desktop environments including KDE and is not just restricted to Gnome.

Deluge has some awesome features making it one of the good torrent softwares for linux:

Another popular torrent clients to try out in Linux is Transmission which is an in-built client. Deluge has many added features over Transmission and the package download for Ubuntu given above is specifically for Ubuntu 9.04 and above.